Client Performance (Updated June 16)

Graphical performance of the game client is an ongoing area of improvement that is being tackled from many directions. In this article I'd like to briefly detail a few of the things we're currently actively working on that will affect client performance.

Trails
Our engine currently doesn't support trails (sometimes called ribbons in other games). Jonathan is working on experimental support for this technology, which will both allow us to create many new types of visual effects, but also to replace old slow effects with much more efficient ones that use trails rather than particles.Update May 16, 2014: Work on trails is completed and Russell is using it to redo a lot of old skill effects. Skills like fireball perform noticeably better now. We don't yet know which patch these updated skills will make their way into.Update June 16, 2014: The 1.2.0 mini-expansion will swap a lot of skills over to using trails, which will make them faster.

Text Rendering
The way we currently render text is slow and has some issues with foreign languages. This slowdown can sometimes be felt when you open chat while playing. Harry is rewriting this system in a way that will fully cater for our foreign text requirements while also getting every bit of speed we can out of our text rendering.Update May 16, 2014: This is mostly complete and Harry notes that it's around 10x faster at rendering text. It's almost certain that this will be included in the 1.2.0 expansion in July.

Preloading of Large Sounds (New: May 16, 2014)
We've found an issue where many objects in-game have really long sounds attached that could instead be streamed from the drive as they play. This causes them to take too long to load, and is easily noticable in areas that contain Vaal side areas (as the heart has a long sound on it). Fixing this will reduce RAM requirements and load times.Update June 16, 2014: This was included in patch 1.1.4. We're keeping an eye on sound sizes in the future.

Please note that much larger improvements are underway but may not be listed here because they don't actively have a developer on them this week. I'll keep this document update as we progress on other optimisation tasks.

Couldnt you just add an option to disable the offending part? We all know what these are. And sadly weve got an answer that 'that would ruin the atmosphere' but i hope that was simply a joke.

Also try to work on I/O lag used when performing stuff for the first time. I have a monster rig,poe on ramdisc and gtx770 (previously sli setup) and using animate weapon for the first time means ~1sec lag. I wonder how it is like for guys with medium specs..

And look tino shadercache. It is the only cache i know that works best EMPTY

Please note that much larger improvements are underway but may not be listed here because they don't actively have a developer on them this week. I'll keep this document update as we progress on other optimisation tasks.

please if this is fixable do something with strongboxes openings. every time when i open one there is huge lag due to loading monsters.
maybe preloa them in moment of entering instance? or after each modification of strongbox?
currently there is no option to defend out of freezing because u cant pop up flask. lags prevents it and ater it ends i am often dead.

Heavily reduce load should be a priority and this can be easily done by removing the most annoying effects but we receive answers like "Screenshots would look bad".
Yes players want their hardware being permanently damaged so screens look good.

Without an expert on the field this will be a really slow task and don't expect players to stick around that long.
The first CoC MTX Hardwarefuckup builds already exist.